Friday, February 27, 2015

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Great leadership usually starts with a willing
heart, a positive attitude, and a desire to make a difference." — Mac Anderson

We
are often not in control of the issues we face at work or home. Problems just
present themselves. And chances are the issues you're facing aren't so cut and
dry. The solution to the problem might just be your attitude.

You
can find at least two ways to look at virtually everything. A pessimist looks
for difficulty in the opportunity, whereas an optimist looks for opportunity in
the difficulty. Unfortunately, many people look only at the problem and
not at the opportunity that lies within the problem.

Having
the right attitude can make the difference between success and failure. A
positive attitude can motivate other people to change their negative thinking
and come over to your side. Everything is possible with right attitude behind
you to push you forward. And since you do have a choice, most of the time
you'll be better off if you choose to react in a positive rather than a
negative way.

The
attitude of the leader has a huge impact on the culture, environment, and mood
of the department or organization. The leader’s attitude tends to spread and
affect others dramatically. A good leader has the attitude of serving his
employees at all times, often at the expense of his own morale or personal
needs. A good leader truly cares about the morale of the team, pushes and
motivates his team with respect, a relentlessly positive attitude and with a
genuine heart.

Kaizen
Only Goes So Far - Martin Boersema says Lean is a two-pronged fork. Use
kaizen to get immediate results and engage your employees. Use Hoshin Kanri and
lean management to get even closer to True North!

Monday, February 23, 2015

"Today
I want you to stop worrying about that final plan, and instead focus on just
putting the next LEGO brick in the right spot. THAT'S IT." That's pretty
much how you build with LEGO. One brick at a time, placed in the right place.
Don't worry about the next brick. Just the brick in front of you.” - Steve Kamb, NerdFitness

You
build small, simple pieces that are easy to understand and then you assemble
them in a variety of complex ways to accomplish a particular goal. When faced
with a challenge that seems overwhelmingly complicated at first break it down
until you can understand the pieces, then watch how they fit together - suddenly
almost anything seems doable.

Building
with Lego bricks is a slow progression that takes patience, especially when you
have a large number of loose blocks to sort through while you are building.

Trying
to do too much when introducing a new process can be overwhelming. Strive to
accomplish small steps over time and build on your successes.

Continuous
improvement is about small changes on a daily basis to make your job
easier. Small step-by-step improvements
are more effective over time than occasional kaizen bursts, and have a
significantly greater impact on the organization culture - creating an
environment of involvement and improvement.

Small
victories tap into motivation. Achievement is fueled by making small amounts of
progress, such as accomplishing a task or solving a problem. Help employees
break projects, goals, and work assignments into small victories. Help them
jump into an achievement cycle.

Making
one small change is both rewarding to the person making the change and if
communicated to others can lead to a widespread adoption of the improvement and
the possibility that someone will improve on what has already been improved.
There's no telling what might occur if this were the everyday habit of all team
members.

Friday, February 20, 2015

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

Leaders
must guide, motivate, and inspire. Guide your team in the direction you want
the group to go by setting a vision, strategy, and goals. Motivate them to bring
their best by expressing your passion, communicating with confidence and
optimism, and connecting tasks to a greater purpose. Your work doesn’t stop there; inspire them to
act by continuously engaging their talents, re-recruiting their spirit, and celebrating
successes.

Always
maintain a positive attitude. Positive attitudes have power in more ways than
one. As a business leader, you should exude optimism which will help your staff
avoid patterns of negativity. When the economic climate is unstable, businesses
will face continual challenges. If you are not optimistic about your ways of
conducting business, it can negatively affect the mindset and productivity of
those who work for you.

The
attitude of the leader has a huge impact on the culture, environment, and mood
of the department or organization. The leader’s attitude tends to spread and
affect others dramatically. A good leader has the attitude of serving his
employees at all times, often at the expense of his own morale or personal
needs. A good leader truly cares about the morale of the team, pushes and
motivates his team with respect, a relentlessly positive attitude and with a
genuine heart

Lean
leaders are optimists and believe the cup is always half full. They aren’t
pie-in-the-sky types, but they see the positive side of an opportunity, and
they believe in their ability to achieve their goals. Leaders provide
inspirational motivation to encourage their followers to get into action.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Unfortunately,
there are not enough organizations that understand quality. Quality is not
additive or final. It must go beyond the product or service. We cannot add it
at the end of the line or inspect it into the product. At best that is only a
false sense of security. If we want a quality product it must be made with
quality processes by quality minded people.

Inspection
can be useful to gather data on the process. Using that data to see if a
process has gone out of control and a special cause needs to be investigated is
useful. Using that data to evaluate the success, or failure, of an attempt to
improve (via the PDSA cycle) is useful.

Many
traditional companies use a final inspection department to 100% check the
product just before it is shipped to make sure that any errors that occurred
in-process are caught before the product is shipped.

Inspecting
to pull out the failed items from the production before a customer sees them is
a path to failure. When companies do this, they are trying to inspect quality
into the product. However, 100%
inspection has been shown to be only about 80% to 85% effective. If the process
is this bad, the process needs to be improved.

"Inspection
does not improve the quality, nor guarantee quality. Inspection is too late.
The quality, good or bad, is already in the product. As Harold F. Dodge said,
“You can not inspect quality into a product." — W. Edwards Deming, Out of
Crisis, Page 29

In
some organizations, we might as well give the quality folks a uniform, a badge
and a gun. They act like they are the Quality Police. Progressive companies
realize you cannot inspect quality into a product. By the time product is inspected, its level
of quality has already been established. The primary means of ensuring a
quality product is delivered is not by waiting until the product is assembled
to test it. Great companies build quality in from the start and maintain that
quality throughout the manufacturing process. To improve quality, you have to
improve the process that produced it.

Generally
the most effective way to achieve quality is to avoid having defects in the
first place. It is much less costly to prevent a problem from ever happening
than it is to find and correct the problem after it has occurred. Focusing on
prevention activities whose purpose is to reduce the number of defects is
better. Companies employ many techniques to prevent defects for example
statistical process control, quality engineering, training, and a variety of
tools from the Lean and Six Sigma tool kit.

Start
with the idea of preventing defects, not waiting until they are identified and
correcting them. Many companies have an active Zero Defects policy where defect
prevention is paramount and quality inspection is almost just a verification of
what they already know – that the product is defect free. If we can start with
quality and maintain that quality throughout the process we will have a quality
product.

Quality
is about prevention—you cannot "inspect" quality into a product. It
has to happen before the inspection process.

Monday, February 16, 2015

5S
is a process and method for creating and maintaining an organized, clean, and
high performance workplace. It enables
anyone to distinguish between normal and abnormal conditions at a glance. 5S can be the foundation for continuous
improvement, zero defects, cost reductions and a more productive work
space. The 5S methodology is a
systematic way to improve the workplace, processes and products through
employee involvement.

1.
Start small

It
would be unwise to try to implement 5S throughout your entire organization in
one go (unless you have a small company), better to select one area in which to
concentrate your efforts and provide a show piece for the rest of the
organization. In my mind it would be best to select the worst area in the
company so as to show what can be achieved and the differences it can make.
Showing success in one area gains the confidence of others and a reason to
buy-in.

2.
Training

The
whole team should be trained in the vision and objectives of the company and
given a clear understanding of what the company is trying to achieve through
them and their 5S program implementation. They need to have a clear understanding
of the seven wastes of lean and an overview of basic lean principles. With this
knowledge they will be ready to undertake their 5S implementation.

3.
Leadership buy-In and commitment

Your
management should understand and practice the ideas of 5S themselves so as to
provide an example to your other employees, it would be hard to motivate your
employees to keep a tidy workspace if every time they walked past their
managers desk they saw piles of untidy clutter. Management needs to be ready to
explain and help fix any situations that arise.

4.
Don’t make it stand alone

Doing
5S is liberating. We have all
experienced that feeling after cleaning the basement or garage after a year of
accumulating stuff. But 5S is just one
tool that enables stability that enables flow.
Well organized and sparkling clean waste is still waste. Getting bogged down in 5S can be an avoidance
pattern - avoiding the hard work of thinking about how to create flow and solve
the real root cause problems inhibiting flow.

5.
Monitor, review, and improve

Once
the team has completed the first activities they’ll need to focus on
sustaining. The team should create standard audits to assess and score their
area so that they can be monitored on an ongoing basis. In addition, the team
should meet to review how things are working and what additional improvements
they could make.Photographs
should be taken of the improved work area and a 5S story board put up to show
the improvements gained. I would also suggest that the team be allowed to make
a presentation to the management and the rest of the organization to show off
their achievements.

The
5S system is a good starting point for all improvement efforts aiming to drive
out waste from the manufacturing process, and ultimately improve a company’s
bottom line by improving products and services, and lowering costs. Many
companies are seeking to make operations more efficient, and the concept is
especially attractive to older manufacturing facilities looking to improve the
bottom line by reducing their costs.

Friday, February 13, 2015

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"A tool is just an opportunity with a handle.
It's just a way of thinking about something differently." — Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly

We
all have stories of those who try to use Lean as a tool to improve their
business but fail. Those of us who have experienced the true power of Lean
understand that it is more than that.

Lean
is not about the tools it’s how they are applied. A large number of
organizations have failed to produce the desired results from the direct and
prescriptive application of Lean tools. The tools themselves have been proven
to work in many situations. The difference must then be in how the tools were
applied, their appropriateness, but not the tools themselves.

There
are thousands of Lean tools, because each problem requires its own unique tool
to help solve it. However, tools do not solve problems but rather people do. People
are needed to apply tools. Basically, leaders have to learn to think
differently and see their customers and business differently, that’s people development,
not tools development.

Lean
is a way of thinking. It is about learning to see opportunities and continually
improving them. Lean is a system of tools and people that work together.